Dawn Apart News

Welcome back, Pioneers, to another edition of our Weekly Apart dev blog series. Although, at least for the German half of our team, the week was kind of short due to celebrating Unity Day (which, for the record, commemorates Germany's reunification and has nothing to do with the cross-platform game engine of the same name;) we still managed to get a lot of stuff done.

But before we share some amazing (mainly visual) progress we made, please make sure to check out the Programmer's Day Sale, where Dawn Apart is featured among other great automation games and also head over to our YouTube channel, where we posted this disturbing security footage of humanoid aliens roaming the surface of Aurora (leave a follow if you there so we can keep you posted with other strange occurrences that happen in the Colony).



[h3]Landing on Aurora [/h3]
In line with the blueprint for our demo we polished and updated the landing sequence of the dropship (called Magpie), by adding audio and visual FX: When the ship lands it will now create thick clouds of dust, terraform the underlying surface and, thanks to our terrain fire propagation systems, sets the surrounding flora on fire.

The Magpie comes equipped with a small sample of machines, conveyor belts and colonists, and once you've landed, you're tasked to lay the groundwork for greater colonization. Whereas in previous builds the ship would magically disappear it now stays on the ground and can be partially disassembled and turned into your very first outpost.

By removing wall and ceiling tiles you can now connect conveyor belts to remove the loadout or attach walls to build additional corridors, integrating the ship into your first factory. All of this is entirely optional, but forming a settlement around a dropship and making it the center of your operations was always a cool detail that we wanted to see in the game.



[h3]Reinforcements have arrived[/h3]
Speaking of cool details and visual improvements - we're super happy to have a new dev member on board. Visual artist Leon, who is studying game design at the HMKW University of Applied Sciences in Berlin, will be interning at our studio until early 2024. The greater region of Berlin is full of talented newcomers and IT&W Games is always excited to give up-and-coming game devs some valuable hands-on experience.

So rather than having him stuck at the copy machine or making coffee for the senior developers (we are more into carbonated maté drinks anyway;), he is mainly tasked with updating the voxel graphics and making Aurora a much more beautiful place. Check out Leon's concept art for our desert biome and the first voxel assets that will very likely make it into the game. Not bad for your first day on the job, right?



While we'll continue to refine the gameplay mechanics we're also focusing on making the world of Dawn Apart a visually more intriguing place, with lots of more trees, plants, creatures, and machines. If you want to follow our progress in real time make sure to pay a visit to our Glass Factory on Discord, where we share all aspects of the development on a daily basis and in real-time. Stay tuned and see you soon!

Originally scheduled for September and in celebration of Programmer's Day (the 256th day of the year) the good folks at Luden.io have launched their second annual Programmer's Day Sale. From October 3-10 they are showcasing games that are not only fun to play, but can teach you to think like a true engineer and feel like a tech wizard!



Of course this includes our own little automation and colony sim (you already know) but please make sure to check out other great titles about coding and automation, many of them with discounts or demos. The event will also be featured as a daily deal on October 7.

Head over to the Programmer's Day Sale now!

Welcome to a new instalment of our dev blog series, in which the colonists finally get busy! Yes, this post will shine some light on how the good folks trying to make an alien hostile planet their home, have to chop, mine, and haul their way out of their new harsh reality - before automation processes and a whole lot of optimizing will eventually make their life on Aurora more endurable.

As laid out in of our previous posts, at the start of our upcoming demo you'll land on Aurora in a small spacecraft with a handful of colonists and a sparse arsenal of resources and machines. Initially, in order to get your colony rolling in the absence of heavy machinery you'll need to gather resources such as wood and mineral ores by hand. So, to guarantee a smooth division of labour we implemented an order system including this fancy (work-in-progress) UI element that lets players select in which order they want to interact with a given entity.


[h3]Chop, chop[/h3]
By selecting the axe icon you can now mark trees for chopping. Right away pioneers - if their personal schedules allow it - will channel their inner Paul Bunyan and seek out to cut down marked trees. Since we are aware that wood chopping in building games often walks a fine line between being annoying and incredibly satisfying (especially if you nail the chopping sounds) we opted for the following system:

Pioneers will hit a tree (with pieces of wood splintering off) until it falls over and a log is spawned. As soon as this log bounces off the ground it fractures into the actual wood resources which are then hauled to the next stockpile. For players, chopping trees will actually be the first touchpoint with our voxel destruction physics. As of now the trees, as opposed to every other asset in the game, are not made out of voxels but here is a screenshot of our WIP system:


[h3]Mine your own business[/h3]
Both tree cutting and manual mining are powered by a tile-based 2D world space dragging system. Selecting an order in the menu will actually change the mouse cursor into the respective icon. In the case of mining simply drag the pickaxe symbol over the ore deposits you want to deplete and colonists will start digging away.

For now they remove about 15 voxels in depth off the planet's surface - one voxel every 10 seconds. When they have excavated five ores the colonists will stop mining and haul the resources to a stockpile. Eventually, assisted by more powerful tools, they will dig way deeper, with the possibility of transforming the planet into hole-riddled wasteland full of craters. These six pioneers tasked with mining for ores were a little overzealous though:)



[h3]Leave your mark[/h3]
Speaking of impact on Aurora's terrain, in the past week we have also started working on a small, but very cool feature. Wherever a pioneer is walking each of their individual steps will leave traces on the ground. In this 'Desire Path' logic there are various stages to the reduction of the flora. At first the grass, in a radius of 3-4 voxels gets thinner and lighter when pioneers trample over it until the first layer of grass voxels is completely gone and only sand remains. The ground can recover however if the hauling routes are no longer used and the biome supports (re)growth.



Overall, we are trying to design (pretty mundane tbh) activities like tree cutting, mining and hauling stuff not only as means to set up your colony and factories but also to show from the get go how you can interact with the fully destructible voxel world and leave your mark on Aurora's surface. We can't wait for you to set foot on the planet yourself once the demo is out (at first exclusively for our Discord members). Until then, see you next week.

...and we're back for this year's last summer episode of Weekly Apart. To set the mood for the upcoming fall season we're inviting you to take a walk down memory lane all the way to the humble beginnings of Dawn Apart in 2021. Back then the game still was tentatively titled Farpoint until we became aware there was a (pretty good) VR shooter out there that went by the same name.

Today we want to compare the early prototypes and concept art with the current state of the game as it is right now. We're still have a long way to go but sometimes it's good to take a breath and look back to where it all started and how far we've come:)

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Tldr: watch this YouTube video for side by side comparisons (we know people love these) - and while you're at it please don't hesitate to leave a follow so we can keep you posted with more videos of visual progress in the months ahead.


In the summer of 2021 the first conveyor was placed on the surface of the then still unnamed planet. As you can see in the screenshot above those were literally quite dark times. All you could do back then was place conveyors belts and some drills on this rugged square of alien land and hope the best before the prototype eventually crashed. But our core idea - build huge factories in an extraterrestrial, isometric voxel world - lived on.



Before we actually were able to build our own assembly lines and factories we envisioned in various voxel dioramas the look and feel of the type of buildings and machines we would like to see in our game. Back then it was decided to focus on the ability to build vertically and include options to create your own factory halls with multiple floors and access points.



Inspired by games like MGS 3 or Ghost of Tsushima, we also decided early on to add to the atmosphere of the planet (by now named Aurora) by including movign grass, plants and trees that are not just simply there but affected by forces like wind, fire or player actions (above you can see an early iteration) To increase the interactivity of our world even more, we also added a grid-based terraforming system that allows you to dramatically change the surface of Aurora.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Another early focus was to refine one of the core elements of any automation game: conveyor belts. So to get your resources from point A to point B in the most logical and satisfying way, in early 2023 we added conveyor dragging mechanics that are 'intelligent' and dynamic while still highly versatile and sandbox-y. As you can see in the video above, when dragged, conveyors automatically adjust to the terrain below or objects in their way, including going over or under other conveyor belts.



Finally, around the same time, we began testing a destruction physics system which takes in upcoming damage of an object and figures out how exactly it should fracture. So for example, when a space marine riddles an It'ak hood with bullets, each projectile will create rays with a given force and trace through the object decreasing its force based on the physical type of the voxel it hits (you can read more about it in this Reddit post).

These were just a few of the many milestones we reached in the last two years (you can read more about these and other additions to the game in this very series of dev blog posts). Looking back it is amazing to see how much the game has changed when you compare a build from a few a months ago with the game that we showed off in our exclusive Discord preview streams. Of course there is still plenty more to develop, conceptualize and implement, so make sure to check again next week when we can hopefully show off more new exciting stuff!

Welcome Pioneers to a new episode of Weekly Apart! In today's edition we want to revisit our two live streams from the past week, in which we premiered alpha gameplay footage exclusively for our Discord followers. We're super happy that we didn't encounter too many game crushing bugs and, with a few exceptions (damn you flickering smoke particles blocking the screen), were able to show you the three pillars of Dawn Apart, namely factory building and terraforming, colony life and destruction.

We're even happier that we received tons of questions and suggestions and did our best to answer them while on the air. We want to use this post as a write up for the most frequently asked questions so those that weren't able to join can learn a thing or two about the game as well. By the way - we are planning to do more of those streams once we can show more cool stuff, so please make sure to join our Discord to be a part of our next stream.



Before we dive into the answers to your questions some housekeeping: We're part of the Steam Strategy Fest that runs through September 4th. We're pretty buried in "Upcoming" section but please visit the festival page to check out other amazing games that proudly wear the 'strategy' and 'colony sim' tags. Also we want to give a special shout out to Bottleneck Gaming - a very cool website with an adjacent podcast for all things automation games - who reached out to us and are going to feature us in an upcoming episode.

Okay, let's dive into your questions in no particular order:

How does terraforming work and will you be able to make underground bases/factories?

Whether there is a hill in your way when building a factory or you have to dig trenches to protect your production facilities against hordes of It'ak - you can add or remove terrain through off-grid and on-grid terraforming (by raising and lowering huge areas of voxels). However, as of now it isn't really practical to dig deep and build underground bases. So the building, automating, and fighting will take place above ground.

What are the benefits of enclosing your factory with walls and roofs?

Just like IRL building your assembly lines indoors protects your machines from environmental decay, makes it easier to maintain them and expands their durability. Also having your machines enclosed makes it much harder for It'ak to destroy your production capacities.



Is there a height limit?
We are going to put a height limit in, but there isn't one in our current build of the game. It won't be extreme though. Just not past the minimum height of the camera. But the game will encourage you to a certain extent to build vertically and you'll be able to erect sky-high factories.

How does the whole 'structural integrity' thing work?
Since you're going to stack multiple floors with heavy machinery on top of each other, we are planning on factoring in structural integrity - meaning for example you would need to place stilts under floors or otherwise they would collapse under a certain weight. However, we're planning on just developing a pretty basic system for it - s in not totally physically accurate. Also we know that there are a lot of players who don't care for such a system so we might as well make it optional.

Will this game be story driven?
While we are adding lore to the world and there will be events and story beats and even decisions in the main campaign, all narrative elements will be purely optional.

So what's the level of micromanagement with your workers? Will you be able to order them directly or are they going to work autonomously?
Both. We have designed a priorities and task system that allows you put the colonists on schedules for sleeping, working and recreations. In addition each colonist has a certain skill set that allows him to do certain tasks that others won't. You'll also be able to draft individuals and make them do activities that interrupt their schedules. Read all about it here.

Will there be allies and neutral people, or only enemies? And what will their technology and military strength be like?
Aurora is populated by the It'ak a humanoid alien race that worships Lucrum (the same precious resource that your employer, the Kobayashi Schwarz Corp., is after). They live in rather primitive huts, have inferior technology and are for obvious reasons not super happy that you dig up their home planet. In the mid- to endgame, you'll be able to interact with them in various ways from collaboration to outright war. Various folks in our Discord community suggested to make the It'ak a heterogenous group consisting of various tribes with different cultures. Others have asked if it was possible to kidnap/recruit It'ak and add them to your workforce. Both are actually great ideas that might end up in the game.